


Never Lonely Here

by comatoseroses



Category: One Piece
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 00:39:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1724780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comatoseroses/pseuds/comatoseroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A minor collection of things focused on Usopp and the sea. With a touch of the Going Merry, free of charge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. to sink to the bottom

Sometimes Usopp dreams about the sea.

Dreams of watching it from the shoreline, dreams of wading in and pushing his fingers through the water. Of a tide that rolls in, blue and orange and white, and carries him away.

Into his sea, his open waters, his great and terrible unknown. He dreams of his fingers, digging in and leaving trails in the sand as he’s pulled in (down, always down). The ocean is deeper than anything, but he doesn’t think that he’s afraid: it’s like hope somewhere below him, a world’s worth, enough to float on if he only looks in time. Like grasping a warm hand and hearing someone’s laughter. He wonders why he’s alone if that laughter still exists somewhere (and it has to exist, somewhere, whoever it belongs to).

_Where did they all go? Where would they be, right now, if he were there?_

How did he not realize he’s been struggling to swim upwards again until he stops?

Usopp dreams that he is alone in the dark, breaking slowly into pieces. He dreams of ocean currents and Luffy’s distant laughter.

He opens his mouth to answer it and the sound of crashing waves swallows his voice- _I wish I could have carried you, I wish I was enough_ \- but he still doesn't feel like he's afraid.

He wishes he could sail again.

(And sometimes- only sometimes- he wishes he could drown.

But Usopp never dreams about drowning.)


	2. perspective is important, too

When Usopp is twelve years old, he carries himself out to a hill overlooking the ocean and sits until it gets too dark to see. Until only the tiny lights of a distant, lively ship would be visible, if it were there to look at.

He’s outgrowing his clothes again. Practically shot up overnight, according to all the adults he runs into (when he’s done being chased off as a liar, which is just the juxtaposition between morning and afternoon for him). The great Captain Usopp is all reedy limbs and knobbly joints, getting taller without getting any thicker, _always_ announced by the heavy clomp of his boots. He’s clumsier. His nose is even longer. He doesn't need a kitchen chair to reach the tallest cabinet anymore. He knows how to fix a leaky pipe with gum and a strip of handkerchief, and he can tell good eggs from bad ones at a glance, and he goes down to wash dishes or catch fish or do laundry so that he can buy things on his own instead of getting handouts.

A man’s _pride_ , he’s been thinking, shouldn't allow for being a burden to his own village.

He’s growing up, goes to figure. He even feels old. It’s only been five years since he lost his mother, but it feels like so much longer to think back. He thinks about seconds sometimes, how they have to go one by one by one by one, and how many more are stretching out in front of him, _waiting_ , and a knot clenches in his stomach. The older he’s gotten, the better he’s gotten at telling himself he’s not lonely or afraid or angry or disappointed in anything. That he’s not worried about all those seconds stretching on and on, feeling like eternity, only for nothing to change with the time.

He’s gotten very good at telling himself things. It’s not an art that he has perfected, though, because _convincing_ himself of things is actually very, very different.

He thinks about his mother and his little house and his little slingshot and his little life and the hole in the knee of his pants that he’ll put a patch on later; thinks about his father a million lifetimes away and imagines that he can still see a shadow stretching across all those miles to home if he squints his eyes and looks just right.

“Yasopp” might as well be the name of a very distant star by now, for all the wishes and stories he’s hung on it.

He doesn't think about how, for all his growing and the island’s subsequent shrinking, for his pride and his father and his pirate’s blood, the impossibly huge span of the ocean is the only thing that doesn't make him feel small.

Not even a little.


End file.
